Yoga Therapy for Low Back Pain

🎙️ Episode 1: Yoga Therapy for Back Pain.

How a Brisbane Physio Discovered Yoga and Never Looked Back.

If you’ve been struggling with low back pain and feel like you’ve tried everything — from physio and Pilates to stretching, medications, or massages — only to end up back in the same cycle of pain, this episode is for you.

In this very first episode of The Empowered Yogi Podcast, I share my story as a Brisbane physiotherapist who discovered yoga not just as exercise, but as a powerful therapy for healing back pain and reclaiming freedom in movement.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why traditional approaches to back pain often fall short (and what’s missing from your recovery)
• How yoga therapy blends physiotherapy principles with nervous system regulation
• The surprising role stress and mindset play in chronic pain
• The key shift that helped me move from frustration to empowerment — and how it can help you too

This episode is perfect for you if:

✔ You experience recurrent back pain or flare-ups that disrupt work, sleep, or daily life
 ✔ You feel stuck in the “quick fix” cycle that never lasts
 ✔ You want to understand how the brain, body, and stress are linked to your pain
 ✔ You’re curious about how yoga therapy is different from a regular yoga class

Key takeaway

True recovery isn’t about pushing harder. It’s about retraining your body, calming your nervous system, and stepping into a new, empowered way of healing.

✨ Don’t miss an episode: Subscribe to The Empowered Yogi Podcast so you never miss tools, insights, and strategies for overcoming back pain. 

👉 Ready to go deeper? Learn more about yoga therapy for back pain by registering for my FREE Live workshop at cathyaganoff.com.au

Thanks for listening. If today's episode landed for you and you had some aha moments and insights, I’d really love to connect with you and hear what they are.

The best place to connect with me is over on my insta. You can DM me there @cathys_yogajournal and if you enjoyed the episode I invite to give it a 5 star rating and leave me a review.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

You've been taught to believe that your low back pain is something to manage, to rest, to ice, to stretch and cross your fingers it won't come back. But what if the pain wasn't something to just live with, but an invitation? What if it was your body's call to become the most empowered version of yourself? Hi, I'm Kathy Aganoff, physiotherapist, yoga teacher, and founder of TriBalance and the Empowered Yogi Method. And this podcast is here to help you reclaim your practice, your body, and your power. In this very first episode, we're going to unpack what it means to be an empowered yogi, how it's different from the way most people approach healing, and how you can begin this journey starting today. I'll hazard a guess that if you've learned here is probably because you're someone who's very proactive about your health and healing for you is about more than just recovering from illness or injury. You're interested in all the ways in which yoga can support you thriving both on and off the mat and really living well. This is really what I mean by an empowered yogi. It's about thriving not just surviving. But let me break it down a little more for you because I find not everyone identifies with the word yogi. Let's start with a definition. For me, an empowered yogi isn't someone who's perfect in their poses or spiritual 24-7. They're not the linen-clad vegan stereotype chanting om in a mountaintop cave, though more power to them if they are. To me, an empowered yogi is someone like you. Someone who's been practicing regularly for a while, has fallen in love with yoga and knows in their bones that this practice is essential for their wellbeing. But maybe an injury like low back pain, sit bone or SI joint pain is starting to get in the way of your practice and you feel stuck, frustrated, even disheartened. This podcast is here to change that because healing isn't just about resting or avoiding certain poses. It's about learning how to move better, think differently and reconnect with who you truly are beyond your pain. So if that sounds like you and what you're going through, then keep on listening my yogi friend, this podcast is for you. Let's name the belief a lot of us have. If I just rest, stretch, or see my physio or osteo for manual therapy, this injury will go away. But here's what I've seen over and over again. In 20 years of clinical practice, passive treatments may offer short-term relief, but they don't really rewire the way you move. They don't build a strong functional core. They don't reconnect you to your energy or intuition. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having passive treatments that give you short-term relief. Any kind of relief is a really good thing. The only problem I usually have with this approach for my clients is that it can lure you into the false belief that you are addressing the root cause of your injury. That's why becoming an empowered yogi is about learning to take the wheel in your own healing through movement, awareness, breath and energetic alignment. And once you learn these tools, you can't unlearn them. They become yours for life. I want to encourage you to look at your healing journey, not just from the perspective of healing the individual parts that are injured, but rather expanding your awareness to take in a bigger picture of healing. One that recognizes that you're not just a body, but a complex multidimensional being with a mind, beliefs and emotions that are all being programmed to either keep you stuck in cycles of pain and injury or to help you to thrive. So each episode will unpack some of the most common problems I see my clients experience in their healing journey. I'll be starting with the most common of injuries and ailments that interfere with yoga practice and life off the mat. After 20 years of doing this work there's just certain injuries and movement issues that I see come up over and over again and so I'm really honing in on these and I'll explain the key steps to overcoming them. This will include things like unpacking the underlying mechanics that are causing the injury to develop in the first place so that you understand why it's happening. I'll help you to know the most important poses to modify in your practice for the particular issue or poses to leave out altogether. We'll look at the types of poses and exercises that we should include and focus more on. And importantly, we'll unpack the different approaches for helping to heal chronic pain that may be associated with the injury. We'll look at how to better regulate the nervous system using yogic tools and practices. So how did I get here? Let me take you back to my very yoga class. I was in London. It was the 3rd of January. I just wrapped up a very indulgent European summer touring around in a van with my now ex. My body felt heavy, disconnected and broken. I walked into a hot yoga class at Yoga Haven in Clapham on a five pound sticky mat from Primark. It was labeled as a non-slip sticky mat, but for sure it wasn't anything but I slipped and slid through that very first hot yoga class. My very first any type of yoga class. Sweat dripping from my face and clothes. The last three months of my European summer's consumption seeping out from my pores. I remember thinking, what on earth did I get myself into? Still very much in recovery mode from my New Year's Eve celebrations and the extended hangover of my European summer adventures. The instructor was painfully slow in counting the breaths that felt like an eternity as I struggled to balance in Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana. I had no idea what that meant at the time. I was like, what is this strange language she is talking in? I was intrigued though. I foolishly thought, oh, I'm an ex-gymnast. I have muscle memory. I've got this. Forgetting at least when I signed up the beating that I put my body through the last few months. But when I think back on it, I think there was a deeper call or a higher guidance that led me to that first class. The impulse to be well was so strong after sabotaging my body and health and really taking it for granted for if I'm totally honest not just that summer but the whole last decade of my 20s. I had really put my body and health through the ringer and in that era in my 20s I think there was a lot of that culture which has changed a lot now in young people thank goodness with much more of a focus on clean living and healthy choices. But in my twenties, this was not the case. I had also spent the last seven years at this point, working as a physio, bent over patients, doing very manually heavy work, manual based therapies, high volume, lots of patients, which had also contributed to postural overload issues in my body. And then coming back to this scene, I'm on my air quotes, non-slip yoga mat from Primark. That moment that I I'll never forget. Sweat still pouring from my face and clothes. As we moved from seated poses now down onto our backs, there was a noticeable shift. Sweet relief to be horizontal finally. Not that I knew what the typical arc of a yoga class was going to be. I had no idea where I was being led. As the sound of Ujjayi breathing began to fade, by now I was becoming used to it somewhat and felt less awkward. As I landed on my back in that first shava I remember this sense of like my whole body sighing in relief. I had no language for it at the time but my nervous system shifted down a gear and then another. I had no more juice left in the tank and no more energy to hold on for a minute longer and I just remember letting go so profoundly and deeply. I didn't know at the time what was happening but I didn't care to try and understand in that moment I just embraced the feeling of relief and as I lay there in what felt like the afterlife like that calm after a storm I remember all memory of the struggle I just endured the last 75 minutes just faded away and I was left with the strong impulse to do it again tomorrow and that I did and then the next day again and the next and the next and fast forward now more than 10 years and I own and run my own yoga studio. You could say from that point on I was hooked. I had already been a physio for seven years by the time I left for London and so much has happened in between this first experience on the mat and now but I really wanted to highlight in this first episode that what drove me to the mat was an impulse to be well after trashing my body. I When I first started, and I think this is true for most people, maybe you too, my level of self-awareness landed mostly in my physical body, which was limited at that. I was pretty cut off from my body in many ways really. I felt stiff and weak and my posture had deteriorated and I wanted to feel more vital and flexible. I had no idea though that this physical transformation was just the beginning of a bigger, more profound mental and and spiritual transformation. began to heal and transform my physical body, I had so many profound aha moments on the mat. As I learned to balance out my posture and develop a strong, effective, functional core, it really gave me leverage I never knew existed, even though I had been a gymnast and thought I had a strong core. But I was way off. I started feeling balanced physically, and the more results or benefits I got from the practice, the more inspired I felt to start really incorporating yoga into my clinical practice as a physio because if I was experiencing firsthand this transformation my patients would likely benefit too. I remember one of the resistances I felt as a physio in my early years especially as a manual therapist in a high volume clinic and one that saw a lot of compensation and work cover claims was this dissonance in providing passive treatments to patients that would then become relatively It just didn't sit well with me and I didn't really know what to do about it. I wanted to be able to really help my patients and actually empower them, not just give them short-term symptomatic relief. So when I went through this myself, it really shifted my level of inspiration in my work as a physio. I started to change my approach from passive manual treatment to a more exercise and yoga therapy approach and to include incorporating more focus on nervous system regulation. Coming back to the kosher model for a moment, I just want to unpack what it is in case you aren't aware. My favorite way of describing it clearly and simply is to imagine Russian dolls and that there's these five dolls. The biggest or outermost doll is your physical body called Anamaya Kosha, which is the earth element. The second is your energy body called Pranamaya Kosha, which is where the chakras live, your seven energy cells. Moving deeper, the third body is your mental body or mind called Manamaya Kosha. This is the level of mind often referred to as your lower mind because it's more connected to your senses and the reactions of your body to the inputs coming in from your senses. So it's kind of your reactive mind and it's mostly run on automatic programming. Moving deeper again, the fourth layer or body is your internal or intellect which is often referred to as your higher mind and it's called this is closest to our source or spirit and is the part of our mind that receives spiritual guidance or downloads it's the sixth sense you may get when you sense something to be true without any support from logic or any hard evidence finally at the very center of the Russian dolls or bodies is Anandamaya Kosha, often called the bliss body. Because when we are connected to this part, it feels like pure positive energy. We can access this state of being during deep meditation or when we are experiencing elevated emotional states like gratitude, appreciation, love, joy, abundance. This is often called source or consciousness. The pervading presence or awareness in the background of everything so there's so much more to you than just your meat suit your physical body there's these five bodies that make up your whole self your whole being before discovering this model i'd never had described before a model for our human design that felt so thorough and complete and really just resonated deeply it was a way of understanding myself and all of my parts in a way like pieces of a puzzle had all come together and it just made so much sense. Before discovering this, I was treating clients only on the outermost layer, but true transformation, it happens when we engage all five. That's what this podcast will explore, how to heal from the inside out, physically, mentally, emotionally, and energetically. So I will be unpacking each of the five bodies in this podcast For this first episode, it's this. You can say to yourself internally or aloud, I am an eternally evolving and expanding being. I am so much more than my physical body and any limitations that I may be perceiving it has. I am committed to my own growth and expansion. You can download a beautifully designed affirmation card with this mantra via the link in the show notes. Save it as your phone wallpaper, print it out, whatever helps you to stay anchored in this truth this week. If this is landing for you and you've been looking for a platform to dive into these kinds of teachings and up-level, not just your physical health but also your mental, emotional, energetic and spiritual health, then I invite you to join me here each week. I have a plan to start with the physical layer and a topic that is around a big part of my niche area of interest, healing low back pain on the mat and how to opt movement around this common injury. And if you're looking for a step-by-step framework to go deeper, I'll be sharing more about my Empowered Yogi Method program in upcoming episodes. And I'm just really grateful to be able to share this and express what really lights me up and hopefully connect with you in a more meaningful way. My intention is to try to provide more value and go deeper with you than I can sometimes in class or on social media, which I love by the way. I love connecting with you on my Insta and getting to have those interactions but it is snippets, bite-sized teachings and I'm really looking forward to being able to go deeper with you. I don't know about you but I'm that person that ends up in the corner having DNMs at the party with another kindred soul. I'm not so much surfing the party having microchats, surface level interactions with lots of different people. So I feel the call to show up here and just see where it takes me. I hope it provides you meaningful value and that it inspires you on your own personal transformation through yoga if today's episode resonated with you i'd love to hear from you send me a dm over on instagram at kathy's yoga journal let me know your biggest aha or takeaway and if you're excited to deepen your practice and truly heal from the inside out please subscribe rate this podcast five stars and leave a review it helps me reach more yogis like you thanks for being here and i can't wait to go on this journey with you